VALENTINE'S MASSACRE MARKED END OF ERA

The year was 1929, and it marked the apex of a decade in Chicago that
roared into history.

Liquor was illegal, though there was plenty of it thanks to Chicago's
infamous gangsters - Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, Big Jim Colosimo and
George "Bugs" Moran.

Lawlessness in the Windy City was the rule, until an innocuous holiday
- - known for its celebration of love - marked the beginning of the end
of a ruthless, brutal era.

On St. Valentine's Day 70 years ago, two so-called cops and two men in
plain clothes drove out in a black Cadillac that looked like an
undercover squad car. They pulled up behind a brick warehouse at 2122
N. Clark St. and minutes later had seven men lined up with their palms
flat against a yellow brick wall. The thugs mowed them down with
machine guns.

A small parking lot wedged between two apartment buildings is all that
remains in Chicago from the brutal massacre. A peaceful Lincoln Park
neighborhood now envelopes the Clark Street block on the city's North
Side.

The warehouse was demolished in 1967 by the National Wrecking Company.
A Canadian businessman purchased the wall, once stained with the blood
of the seven gangsters executed in front of it, according to Sheldon
Mandell, president of the wrecking company. The wall was rebuilt,
brick by brick, in a men's club in Saskatchewan.

Bob Ernst, an antique dealer who works just doors away from the former
warehouse, remembers visiting the former crime scene as a child with
his father.

"It was kind of eerie," Ernst, 50, said. "You could put your fingers
in the machine gun bullet holes."

Those holes in the wall crossed in three horizontal lines, and Ernst
said he could see how the mobsters sprayed their machine gun fire.

Police could never prove Capone ordered the slaughter, but wiretaps
placed on Capone's phones by federal Prohibition agents showed he knew
rival gangster "Bugs" Moran was intercepting his liquor shipments.

One of those shipments, hijacked from Detroit, was supposed to be
delivered to the warehouse the night before the killings, according to
Paul Heimel, the author of a new book about Eliot Ness, the man who
helped bring Capone - and his era - down.

But there's plenty of evidence the gangster's legacy and the memory of
the massacre still flow through the veins of organized crime in Chicago.

"There's no question that what (Capone) did in the 1920s and '30s laid
the foundation for organized crime today," said Ross Rice, a spokesman
for the FBI. Some of the Mafia leaders of the 1970s were Capone's
underlings in the 1920s, he said.

Chicago's Crime Commission has tracked organized crime since before
the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Recently, it published a list of
about 150 current suspected mob leaders.

"We've built our reputation on 80 years of naming names," said Wayne
A. Johnson, chief investigator for the commission.

While street gangs and mob crime families do not now deal in illegal
alcohol, they still have their hands in drugs, gambling and businesses
in the Chicago area, Johnson said.